Parking Eye Court Claim

bazster

Congratulations liseylou, I look forward to hearing more details.

45mip19lot, next time you want to make a long post try typing it in Notepad, then simply copy-and-paste into the web page.

Coupon-mad

liseylou wrote: »

Well I thank you all for all your help – I know that I wouldn’t have been able to cope it is wasn’t for the support of this forum.

I am in the process of typing up the events from this morning but the case lasted 2½ hours, so it isn’t going to be quick – please bear with me and I will get to it asap to let you all know the finer detail.

WHOOP WHOOP – ANOTHER WIN FOR THE MOTORIST !!!

Aww liseylou please tell us your experience and what happened!

bargepole

Coupon-mad wrote: »

Aww liseylou please tell us your experience and what happened!

I just got back from being out all afternoon, and was looking forward to reading liseylou's tale of derring-do in which the evil forces of ParkingEye and LPC Law were hammered in a Court hearing - but still no report after 4 days.


I can only assume that she is writing the report on parchment with a quill pen, and is still doing the illustration for the initial capital letter in similar fashion to the medieval monks.

Coupon-mad

She's probs out celebrating!

45mip19lot

Thanks Bazste, I will give it a go.

I sat in on the hearing between Liseylou & Parkingeye, so I can give a brief overview, as it looks like Liseylou has walked away??
Liseylou used my witness statement and just changed some minor details in order to make it personal to her (only car reg;hearing reference; date etc).

Apart from the lottery aspect, it looks like a winning statement, so if anyone else wants a copy, they are more than welcome to have one.

The hearing for Liseylou was scheduled to commence at 10:30 and mine at 14:00. As Bargepole mentioned earlier, forget the Judge that is mentione on your court hearing papers, it is whoever is available that day. Liseylou was allocated Deputy Judge Murphy, but I have no idea who the original Judge was.

Like I said earlier, the judge allowed me to sit in as it was an open court and the hardest thing I had to do all day was keep my mouth shut , as I wanted to comment all the time when I believed something was not factually correct and Liseylou had not responded, but it was not my place to do so.

Basically, the arguements put forward were:
1)Lack of standing by the Claimant
2)No loss suffered by the Claimant
3)Inadequate signage to form a contract
4)Overstay

It was pretty obvious right from the start that the Judge had not looked at any of the witness statements as all he kept saying to Liseylou was 'what are the facts of the case?' 'keep to the facts'.

Liseylou tried to argue that Parkingeye were not the landowners, so they couldn't bring a case....
Nothing was mentioned about the losses being disproportionate with the amount being charged as far as I can remember, but the Judge did mention about the £100 being a deterrent rather than a penalty.

There was a lot of discussion about the signage being misleading and the solicitor for Parking eye stressing that the distribution of the signage around the car park was adequate and that everything was stated in the small print, so there was nothing non-compliant about it.

Then we moved on to the fact that the overstay was only for 22 minutes and that a ticket was purchased for 3 hours at a cost of £4.80.

The Judge asked what provision was made for a 'grace period'? as nothing was mentioned on the signs.

Liseylou pointed out that it was 20 minutes at the car park in Fistral beach, five minutes away, that was also managed by Parkingeye.

The Judge went to great lengths to stress that he was of the opinion that a 'parked car' was a stationary car, so the time spent looking for a parking space was not deemed as parking.

The signs mentioned nothing about grace periods and the judge felt that considering the time of year (August), it was not unreasonable to assume that it would take time to find a space, time to queue up and purchase a ticket, then to queue up again in order to exit the car park, so 22 minutes was easily explained.

We were then asked to leave, whilst the judge considered all the evidence.

When we were asked to re-enter the room, the Judge began to dictate into the recorder rather than address anybody directly.

In a nutshell, he dismissed the lack of standing,as he considered Parkingeye had the authority.

He considered the £100 as a valid deterrent, so he dismissed that too.

He considered that the signage was adequate to form a contract regarding parking, albeit a lot of the wording was in the small print, so he dismissed that as well.

However he went on at great length again to say that a moving car was not a parked car, and as there was nothing within the signage to cover the ruling on getting to and from the parking bay within the white lines he was going to uphold the appeal and dismiss the case.

I hope this explains how the verdict was reached, but please feel free to ask me, if I have missed something out.

bargepole

He considered the £100 as a valid deterrent, so he dismissed that too.

If he considered it was a deterrent, then it WAS a penalty, and should have been dismissed for that reason alone. You can't have a 'valid' deterrent, other than in Moloney world.


Some of these DJs need to go back to Law School.

Redx

so similar to the ivor pecheque one where circling round looking for a space is not "parking" and so the 22 minutes is explained away , plus I suspect the judge found favour in the fact a ticket was bought on the day too (as opposed to an incident where no ticket is bought and its a p&d car park)

shame about the failures regarding no standing and the not a gpeol , especially as it was a deterrent, but a win is a win

I fully understand the hardest part was you wanting to speak, lol , must have been really frustrating if you felt lisey had a good ripost or rebuttal point and failed to mention it in court

Umkomaas

I sat in on the hearing between Liseylou & Parkingeye, so I can give a brief overview, as it looks like Liseylou has walked away??

It would be very sad if this is the case especially given all the effort senior forum regulars have put in to helping her through this.

Maybe she's gone away on holiday to celebrate?

Judgement reserved!

Coupon-mad

Thanks for posting that, Mike.

Let us know on your own thread in due course if your own case rears its ugly head again.

liseylou

Hi everyone - really sorry I've not been online for a while but I've just got back from a week in Gran Canaria. I didn't get time to post after the hearing as I had to catch up on everything that's been neglected whilst I was preparing for the case. Unfortunately I didn't have Internet access whilst on the beach and my family wouldn't have appreciated me logging on whilst relaxing either.

Well, Mike summarised everything perfectly. I'll just add a few things that I remember.

The LPC Law rep James Millard approached me before we went in and said "Well it's obvious we won't be suggesting a settlement now, but I wanted to check on the main points of your defence?" That's when Mike arrived and James didn't want to talk in front of him so asked to go outside. Anyway, he just wanted to know that I wasn't going to throw any surprises at him. I realised after reading a few other forum posts, that if I kept him sweet, he may be sweeter. He wanted to check that he understood correctly from my defence the 2 main areas I would be raising, from memory that was a) no contract b) signage? then I replied saying I would be basing my defence on the witness statement submitted on 11 August. He was confused as PE had not provided a copy of this - perhaps they didn't fancy copying 500 pages of evidence. The nice person I am, I agreed to share mine in the hearing.

As I said, Mike's summary is excellent. The judge wouldn't budge on lack of standing. He said even without a contract, PE wouldn't go to the trouble of putting up all of the signage, furniture I think he referred to it as, if the landowners weren't happy for PE to act on their behalf.

I was pretty dumbstruck to start with, so forgot to mention GPEOL, although the judge thought that the £100 was a deterrent anyway. He was familiar with the Cambridge case and referred to it throughout the case, as did James Millard. Maybe with more preparation, I'd have been able to change his view point in this regard.

Signage - James pointed out that in the very small print of the T&Cs it refers to 'time waiting' and he tried to imply that it should be paid for. The judge tried to understand how you could possibly pay for time waiting in a car PARK. He discussed this for some time, each time referring to waiting time rather than parked time and looked at the signage in our bundles. Millard kept referring to the P&D charges sign which includes T&Cs in tiny print. This could have gone very wrong for me if Millard have kept his mouth shut!! The judge realised that it was not 'inadequate signage' that was the issue, it was poor explanation within the signage. He stated that FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS was unclear as you would think this would refer to the previous wording not the small print below. We now know that in Tower Road, the wording has been changed to 'failure to comply with the terms and conditions below' or something similar.

In relation to overstay, the judge gave 2 scenarios to indicate how they would differ in August and December and that 22 minutes is not unreasonable in the height of the summer. Unfortunately, I had not factual evidence to show this except the ANPR picture clearly shows the sun and shadows of the car.

When we were called back in for the judgement, I was convinced I'd lost. The judge disagreed with every point of my defence. The one point I thought would sway him was the overstay grace period. Although he agreed that the overstay was reasonable at the time of year, I had no factual evidence to defend myself, he doubted that the town would be gridlocked at 4:50pm - I know that it was but couldn't prove it and knew that arguing would have gone against me.

Anyway, the point that one the case was the poor explanation within the signage, that wonderful word 'THIS!!'.

The judge was ready to get up and go so I remembered about expenses and bumbled my words but asked for my costs of £100.80 (from memory). The judge declined £18 per hour but agreed £45 instead for half a day (half of £90) for loss of earnings and travel taking it to just over £50. James asked for 21 days to pay instead of 14. I presume I could have then mentioned the without prejudice offer I made of £20 that was rejected and theirs that I rejected of £50??

My advice to you all - BE PREPARED!! Know your case inside out so that you can go to your exhibits instantly in court. If I had to do it again, I would have prepared a detailed explanation of my individual defence points to reel off to the judge (when I lost my nerve), after LPC have made their statement... Remember to cover all of their points too. I was prepared, but always clam up in these situations so I forgot it in an instant, but I felt fabulous afterwards and it was very worth it. I took an instant dislike to James to start because he was full of himself before we went in and when I asked where his practice was (bit of small talk) he said London, I've travelled all the way from London, as though that was my fault!!! But when we got into the case I felt rather sorry for him. PE hadn't provided him with all of the evidence and he wasn't fully confident with what they had given him. He did have the gift of the gab though which could have gone against him too. I'm sure there was some reference to my lack of understanding of the law, whilst representing myself, so his use of long words etc were uneccessary.

Thanks everyone for your support. It was a fantastic experience but could have turned out so differently, I knew that to start with and was prepared for the consequences if I'd have lost.